Question: Suppose a teacher falls into his “blind spot” and does not notice that he revels in his power over people and begins to abuse it. In this case, should we patiently wait for these states to pass or should we still limit him?

Answer: When this happens in a regular psychological group, we shouldn’t restrain him; instead, we must work with him as with any other person. But if we are in an advanced group, which is already beyond simple egoistic relationships and attitudes, then we must understand that the teacher can appear as an egoist, a very strange person, moody, and dictatorial. He can appear this way to students because he really is on a high level, and this is why he behaves this way. It is written: “Do not judge your friend before you reach his level.”

This is why we must always understand that when it comes to friends, it’s easy to respond since we can more or less understand their states. But when it comes to the teacher, we might not understand his states; they might appear egoistic, dictatorial, moody, and willful. It’s possible that his states only appear this way to us because his level is higher than ours, and we don’t adequately perceive every consequent state.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” 2/27/12 

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Question: When a person studies according to the integral method how can he later evaluate whether his studies have been successful?

Answer: If a person was able to be in constant contact with his environment, whether it’s virtual or physical, and this contact served him as way to come out of himself into the common feeling and sensation, the common thought and movement, into the search for the goal and analysis, then his time definitely did not go to waste. In other words, exiting oneself towards “outside of himself’ must be a constant aspiration, a person’s movement, and then life will be different.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 2/27/12

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In the News (from BBC News): “People of working age who live alone increase their risk of depression by up to 80% compared with people living in families, says a Finnish study. It says the main factors are poor housing conditions for women and a lack of social support for men, who are both equally affected.

“The study tracked the use of antidepressants in 3,500 Finnish people.

“A mental health charity said people who lived alone must be given outlets to talk about their problems.

“The study authors highlight the fact that the proportion of one-person households in Western countries has increased during the past three decades, with one in every three people in the US and the UK living alone.

“‘This kind of study usually underestimates risk because the people who are at the most risk tend to be the people who are least likely to complete the follow up. We were also not able to judge how common untreated depression was.’

“Living alone, the study said, could be linked with feelings of isolation and a lack of social integration and trust, which are risk factors for mental health.

“Beth Murphy, head of information at mental health charity Mind, said the rise in the number of people living alone had had a clear impact on the nation’s mental health.

“’It is therefore essential that people who live alone are given the most appropriate treatment such as talking therapies, which provide safe, supportive environments to discuss and work through problems, rather than simply being left to rely solely on antidepressants.’”

My Comment: That is why they should study at the classes of integral upbringing—to acquire a special society that creates waves of positive connection, closeness, and love in every participant. Then, we will be able to conduct a research study and show how much we managed to increase their level of happiness, confidence, and psychological and physical health, and how much the criminal and suicide rates went down.

In our address to society, we should reach out to lonely people and explain to them that precisely in our circle they will find warmth and the support of the environment. The collapse of the institution of marriage is intended to show people that they need to build their relationships on a different level, the level of unconditional bestowal and love, rather than on beastly attraction.
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It’s impossible to solve the problems of modern society in any way but by education that will teach a person to live in an integral world, will help him rebuild the connections we have lost with our children, our spouse, the boss at work, the authorities, the world, and all of nature, including the pets at home. A person must learn to establish external ties, which means that he must learn how to exit himself and start connecting with someone on the outside, even with his pet cat.

Our future depends on how we learn to establish the right connections among us so that everyone, by keeping his uniqueness, will learn to express himself in society. First we must stop blaming life and complaining about what’s happening. All the negative phenomena in society and in the family, which we witness these days, are a result of our development. We should stop, make a cut through the current situation, and study it carefully, taking into account all the statistics.

Second, we should study the history that has brought us to this situation. From this point onwards, by learning about the events that led to this point and examining the statistics on the current state, we will continue to study the future trend. We have to understand that this development will take place one way or the other, whether we like it or not. If we resist, nature will force us to follow this track. But if we aspire for this development by ourselves, we will advance quickly, easily, and pleasantly.

The natural trend of development is a general connection, worldwide integrality. So we have to learn to adapt ourselves by ourselves to all the future events that lead us to such an integral connection, in order to go through them easily and wisely. Just as we prepare children for life, we have to prepare ourselves now for the new future life. This involves every aspect of our life, the relations in the family, with our spouse, with the kids, and with the whole world. I wish you all luck!
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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12

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Divorce has become very common today. There is an upsurge in the number of the divorced couples lately and their age is going down. Some of the married couples divorce in the first years of their marriage. There is a theory that marriage may have run its course. After all, life is full of temptations and it’s very hard to live with the same person for a whole lifetime.

A woman who has a family and children suddenly feels that she doesn’t love her husband anymore. He may be a good husband and a good father, yet it doesn’t matter; she simply doesn’t love him. There is a new natural phenomenon that is common among many women who suddenly lose the internal feeling of dependence and connection with their husband.

This was never typical of women. A woman who lived with her husband always got used to him and felt that she belongs to him. Suddenly all this is gone. This is a natural result of our development. We mustn’t blame the women if this is a natural phenomenon. First we have to study the phenomenon and see what to do about it.

It’s a result of our development: We leave the animate level and rise to the level of human, Adam, who resembles (Domeh in Hebrew) the global nature. Since we have to connect with this general nature now, with all of humanity, it breaks our personal private connections. Nature wants to “open our eyes,” to take us out of the family framework so that we will return to it later, but on a different level.

Everyone remembers the feeling of being in love, the strong unusual emotions, the excitement, inspiration, and the wholeness for which it was worthwhile to be together and to build a family. But with time this feeling disappeared. So why do we naturally fall in love that later disappears, forcing us to look for it all our lives?

Nature wants us to reach true love and to break off the beastly, egoistic love that doesn’t last. We have to change the instinctive attraction to the other sex, caused by natural passion and hormones, to a more purposeful connection.

The ordinary connection is formed because we are living for the children or for a shared household. In addition, it is convenient to be together since we can help each other and support each other when we grow old. But today we have to find the higher, internal connection. It’s impossible to keep a person in the old frameworks: He may throw away everything and leave. The children grow and leave the home and there is nothing to keep us together; so we’ve split everything that we have and get divorced. We see this everywhere.

In order to keep the unity of the family, we need a more sublime motive. It’s just as we have to reach peace and understanding all over the world since we won’t survive otherwise. But when we connect with the whole world because we have no choice, we suddenly discover that the main profit is not economic success at all! It was just an excuse to push us into building up better connections.

Suddenly, we actually discover that there is a totally new feeling in this connection that detaches us from corporeal life. We feel a fuller, more spiritual life. All of a sudden we discover a filling that we haven’t felt our whole life. We simply float in the air, feeling the extraordinary lightness of being without feeling death.

Before, I had to connect under nature’s pressures that set the condition: “You either connect or here will be your burial place.” But later I am surprised to discover that these relations are totally different. I simply couldn’t imagine that this will receive a higher filling, above this whole life.

It doesn’t matter how much you tell a person about this, he won’t understand. Therefore, nature pushes us from behind by suffering, obliging us to connect before we destroy one another. We connect since we have no choice only to eventually discover the beauty in this connection.

The same thing happens in the family. Now we hate one another and don’t want to be together, wanting to get divorced. But if each of us discovers in the world the lack of love, the need, and the desire to love, and if each of us understands what a sublime filling love brings, we will want to have these relations in our family. We will return to the family after we learn to love the whole world! Then we will want to reach an inner, personal connection with a spouse.

Then it won’t matter that we grow old in a number of years and are not as attractive as we used to. We won’t even pay attention to that. We’ll feel the same first love, but in a totally different way, and only after we learn to build internal relations by connecting with the whole world.
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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12 

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We hope that we will gradually reach a level of agreement in society, the state, and between people when people begin to understand that no one else can change them but they themselves, and they will not be able to change the world without changing themselves, that the world is a person’s perception, his own reflection, and this is why it is necessary to play as if in the future so this future would become the present. As Kozma Prutkov once said: “If you want to be happy, be happy.” In general this is how it is.

This is why an instructor must also sort of be a psychotherapist. He must understand people very well and know all about this. Instructors must finish courses and have a lot of experience. They need to study exact formulas of behavior, change, and human reactions. In other words, the foundation of their experience must contain specific scenarios with proper inputs and outputs. They must understand what they are doing with people and the kinds of reactions that people might have, and they need to know exactly what they need to achieve the output.

Moreover, when working with a group of adults, we must also turn them into instructors while working with them because every person, in general, is his own instructor. And when he interacts with others, it turns out that everyone is instructing one another and themselves. In other words, this work is two-sided, it is the work of partnership between all the people.

And even though, in the beginning, there are instructors, educators, teachers, and methodologists working with the group, the group takes the entire method from them, the entire chain of changes that it must experience, the entire program, all the exact laws of behavior, the laws of influence and commutation between each other. At the end, everyone in the group comes to a point when they can apply this method to themselves and others, and actively interact with the rest, having exact understanding of how to change themselves under the influence of the group.

In other words, when a person ends up in any, even an accidental scenario, he feels exactly how to behave and how to fix this situation so he could influence it and make it have the right influence on him. This way he will always be able to work properly with the environment and simultaneously make it into an instrument for himself and the group that he influences.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 2/27/12

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When I am included in society, I want to bestow upon all the other souls, all the desires that are outside me. But what can I bestow upon them? Then I (I) receive a very great Light from the Creator, the Light of Ein Sof (Infinity) (∞) that passes through me to others.

Eventually, each of us becomes similar to the Creator in his relation to others—the One who bestows, who feels everyone and fills them.

At the same time, we are all different and no one can take the place of another. Everyone has his own special abilities that allow him to join others and to give them something that only he can give them. It is this ability that makes a person similar to the Creator in his attitude to others.

The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us that a person shouldn’t be pressured or oppressed. The education should be free: We teach people about mutual guarantee, mutual connections, mutual help, and mutual fulfillment, but without coercion. If we dictate anything besides this to a person, we will deprive him of the ability to connect with others correctly and to bring his unique contribution for the benefit of all. He will not be able to be like the Creator in is attitude to the world and will not be able to raise himself to the Creator’s level, to the level of the One who bestows.

“Bestowal” is when I receive from the Creator and pass the Light that is meant for others through me. In order to enable a person to do that we have to give him the right education, without any pressure or oppression, according to the principle of: “educate the child in his own way.” In other words, develop his attributes, but don’t pressure, don’t oblige, and don’t break.

This is a special method and we have to learn how to use it. If we educate our children this way, they will become whole and successful people. This is because we will teach them to easily connect with others and thus provide them with the means to come closer to the Light. Thanks to this it will be easier for them to identify the general force that is concealed in nature. This is the uniqueness of our education.

A person in this world actually lacks only one thing, to know how to connect with other people. By learning how to connect, he will undoubtedly succeed in everything. This is the correction of the world. All our other dealings are only lies. We confuse ourselves by imaginary successes after which there are always disappointments, and crises and our troubles only keep on growing.
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From the Brazil Convention 5/05/12, Lesson 4

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Opinion (Ashok Gadgil, Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory): “We are a global civilization, we have global operations, global economic activity, and we are dependent on the resources of the planet. Our civilization is so big and powerful that we can mindlessly destroy a thin film of life on our planet…

“As a result, the main task, in my opinion, is to find out what should be the laws of the new economy: consumption, population, industry, the management of society.

“Studies repeatedly show that the best way to control the population is to educate women. Education stops the oppression of women and solves a lot of social problems.

In nature, every kind wants to multiply and flourish, but all kinds live in harmony with other species on which they depend. And only a human being wants to take the whole area.

“This behavior cannot be a long-term pattern of behavior. We need to evolve, rather than to increase consumption, destroying the world. Today, few people think about future generations, everyone thinks about the current moment.”

My Comment: Kabbalah says that if we had liberated women from work and sent them to the “courses of integral education and upbringing,” we would have:

– been released from the burden of unemployment,

– ceased to produce unwanted goods,

– stopped depleting resources,

– stopped polluting the planet.

and women, freed from unnecessary work, and on the basis of acquired knowledge, would have dealt with education and upbringing of their men and children, and we would have found a solution to the crisis in all areas.
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Question: Let us say that there are dozens of integral learning groups in a certain neighborhood. How can they later merge into a single whole?

Answer: Today, having such a powerful mass media and ways for people to connect, we simply need to invent plenty of games, ways for people to be included mutually, like TV shows or fun attractions like panel games, when different groups meet and interact with each other. They begin to show us ways to change one another, how a person positions himself to affect others in a specific way.

Later, groups generally become diffused. They do not stay forever static like some frozen organization, community, city, dwelling, or middle-aged union. They do not. In the end, this will be a society where many people, or even everyone (I am referring to the future), will understand how they can make every situation work for them and be for the sake of others at the same time.

Once they understand this, they will see clearly how to interact and communicate with each other. In other words, any time they interact will be to help themselves and others have the best integral interconnection. They will work on being integrated with others every single moment, and thus will always feel a certain unity, which they already will feel and perceive as their and the world’s completely different state.

They will feel above our world in this unity, as if they were floating in a completely different human concentrate where different laws of behavior exist, the so-called “laws of commutation,” laws of unity and integration. By supporting each other in this and constantly being above our egoism, they begin to perceive a different kind of reality.

When a person is surrounded constantly by people who agree to play this kind of game, then this game gradually turns into a completely new kind of communication, and then the perception of a different space where, instead of receiving from others, we give to others. We work in a direction that is opposite to our current direction.

This new direction allows us to become free of our limitations. Instead of viewing every state as a state that obligates me and offers me the opportunity to take from the outside, on the contrary, I regard them as states that offer me the opportunity to come out of myself, become freer, and stop being limited and confined to myself.

Moreover, everyone else supports me in this. In the end, I will reach a comfortable, unrestricted state. It does not obligate me toward anything. On the contrary, it gives me an opportunity to feel free.

I am referring to relationships between people that we yet do not see anywhere today, but if we teach people these kinds of relationships, then in the end, they will aspire to this state. Once there are many people like this, they will overcome their egoistic resistance and communicate with each other above their egoism in a new mode. They will perceive a higher reality in it. We need to bring them to this.
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From “A Talk on Integral Upbringing” 2/27/12

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If I could peep out of my small envelope and see where I am in this global world, how I treat all of humanity, which as one soul goes through different changes, by approaching its perfect state, I would perceive my life a little differently. I wouldn’t look at my personal life, at a life that is as small as an ant’s life, that shouldn’t be taken into account at all.

If you are included in the great global process together with others, you will feel that you are in the infinite flow of life. In the meantime we should learn what to do in order to feel the eternity of nature and to be included in it. Then from this height you will be able to solve all your personal problems.

But if we try to fix them on the ordinary corporeal level, we will not be able to solve anything. The evidence for that are all the futile attempts to correct the current situation taken by governments. There is no other means to correct our personal state, except for integral education and upbringing.

Therefore, a woman who feels miserable today since she couldn’t find a partner with whom to build a family and have children should understand that this is how nature wants to compel her to be included in the whole world as a woman.

As a result of being included in the world, which is the result of the integral education, she begins to understand the connections she should have with others. She begins to feel how good this connection in mutuality with the whole world is.

Then she will meet the right man and they will begin to learn how they can support one another mutually, in order to rise to the spiritual level and to become one, although they can still be different and stay each in their own ego.

The moment the personal perception changes, everything will immediately work out. They will want to be more strongly connected and to have children, so that the mutual connection can be implemented spiritually. This spirit will oblige them to build a family.
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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12

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